DAILY POST YOUR VOICE IN WALES: Valley must be a force for good.

LET us, first of all, without equivocation, welcome the decision to name RAF Valley as the "centre of excellence" for training our fighter pilots (or "top guns") of the future on a new generation of Hawk jets.

We can all welcome this move with a clear moral conscience in the belief and expectation that these young men and women will, if called upon, be able to defend our country and themselves courtesy of the best training money can provide in the best machines for the job.

We have a duty to defend ourselves and others from aggression. A well-armed, well-trained military can - and should be - a guarantor of peace.

We can also welcome the news that the airplanes we are used to seeing buzzing around our mountains in the interests of developing flying skills par excellence are quieter than some of the machines to be based elsewhere.

Learning to defend the peace is all very well in principle until peaceful nights are shattered and animals are terrified into aborting their unborn young. Hawks we have learned to live with - flown responsibly. Typhoons would be a less agreeable prospect.

We also welcome the undoubted benefits the investment in the training infrastructure will bring to Anglesey and beyond - classrooms and hangars need to be built and serviced.

And we should be proud that a tradition for which the island has become celebrated - as a force for good - is to be continued, thus ensuring the future of a valued and valuable local facility and employer.

This multi-million pound boost to our economy - and the way it is to be implemented - is therefore "good" news for a variety of reasons, though we are mindful that not everyone is overjoyed by the existence of war planes for whatever reason. We cannot lose sight of the fact that they are designed to be used as weapons and the pilots are not being trained for their own pleasure (though we hope they enjoy their training while they are here).

RAF Valley has attracted in the past - through no fault of its own - scrutiny from human rights activists who have suspected the facility was being used to train pilots from overseas regimes who would be used as unprovoked aggressors against unarmed civilian populations.

It is up to all of us to ensure that the governments we elect are principled in their dealings with military dictatorships and do not hire out our training centres for any purposes for which we would rightly be ashamed.